Old Hijazi: Difference between revisions

It’s been taken for granted by both academics and Muslim scholars that Classical Arabic was the language of the Quran and Arabs before Islam and during the first three centuries of Islam. This is reflected in the way Muslims recite the Quran and Hadith today. It’s even reflected in all Arabic historical movies and TV works depicting the early centuries of Islam such as the “Al-Risālah” movie about the life of Muhammad where all the actors are shown speaking in Classical Arabic with its two main hallmarks: full case inflection (final short vowels and nunation or Tanwīn) and full use of the Hamzah (glottal stop). This belief is reinforced by the popular claim by Muslim scholars that the readings tradition of the Quran, which the Quran is recited based on, were transmitted to us verbatim from the mouth of Muhammad. And all of these readings employ a full case system and heavily use the Hamzah. But recent academic research pioneered by Ahmad Al-Jallad of Ohio University and Marijn Van Putten of the University of Leiden, shows that the Quran was actually composed in a different language, which they call Old Hijazi, the ancient vernacular dialect of the Hijaz region which includes Makkah and Medina.   

Old Hijazi differs markedly in pronunciation and grammar from the later classical Arabic that is imposed upon the Quran. This imposition led to the mismatch between the pronunciation and the text, which means the Quran was originally written phonetically in Old Hijazi. Old Hijazi sounds like modern Arabic vernacular as modern Arabic dialects are completely devoid of the case system and devoid of the Hamzah to varying degrees.   

The characteristics of Old Hijazi were revealed by (1) early Arabic texts written in Greek and Hebrew letters which showed what the early defective Arabic script couldn’t, (2) the investigation into the Quranic Consonantal Text (QCT) which is the underlying consonantal skeleton (in Arabic, rasm رسم) of the Qur'an that originally lacked dots and other signs.  

'''1- Lack of nunation and final short vowels except in construct.'''  

'''2- The feminine ending is always “ah” and it only turns to “at” in construct or when a pronoun gets attached to it.''' E.g. :

'''4- The “L” of the definite article doesn’t assimilate to the following coronal consonant'''<ref>Ibid, p.49</ref>.  

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Historical linguists Van Putten and Phillip Stokes note that such a spelling convention is unique among the languages of the world<ref>Marijn Van Putten & Phillip Stokes, Case in the Quranic Consonantal Text, p7</ref> . They also challenge the pausal spelling convention by the following arguments based on the linguistic analysis of QCT:

Khalaf’s statement agrees with what early grammarians report. Mukhtār Al-Ghawth says in his book "The dialect of Quraish": “Since that the Hamzah is hard to pronounce, some early Arabic dialects leaned towards dropping the hamzah. This was most notable in the dialect of Quraish as all early sources agree that this dialect lacked the hamzah.” p.39